Three Score & Ten

There was, however, one spark of consolation. It came from the fact that Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had been three years since she had tried her abortive love affair with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings, he would ride up to her shafts and just say: ‘Good day’, and look at her with eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say: ‘You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A.D. – at disposition.’

It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take him up again, but because it showed her that there was in the world one faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed her that she was not losing her looks.

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty, but she was as clean run as on the day she had left the convent – as clear in outline, as clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She thought that her looking-glass told her this; but there are always the doubts. … Rodney Bayham’s eyes took them away.

 Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier

If Edward could put up sufficient money to serve as a kind of insurance against accident she was ready to like Edward for a time that would be covered, as it were, by the policy. She was getting fifty thousand dollars a year from her Grand Duke; Edward would have to pay a premium of two years’ hire for a month of her society. There would not be much risk of the Grand Duke’s finding it out and it was not certain that he would give her the keys of the street if he did find out. But there was the risk – a twenty percent risk, as she figured it out. She talked to Edward as if she had been a solicitor with an estate to sell – perfectly well and perfectly coldly without any inflections in her voice. She did not want to be unkind to him; but she could see no reason for being kind to him. She was a virtuous business woman with a mother and two sisters and her own old age to be provided comfortably for. She did not expect more than a five years’ further run. She was twenty-four and, as she said: ‘We Spanish women are horrors at thirty.’

Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier